After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

Because AJAX moves so much application logic from the server to the client, it forces many developers to master a wider range of web technologies than ever before. To work effectively on AJAX projects, front-end developers have to concern themselves with database performance, business logic and other server-side concerns. Back-end and middleware developers, meanwhile, have to make friends with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and a wide range of browsers.

Excerpted in part from Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible by Christopher Negus (Wiley Publishing, 2005). In its Fedora Core Linux system, the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project aims to only include software that is Open Source and free of reasonable patent claims. As a result, at random intervals, an article or mailing list post will exclaim how Fedora sucks because it doesn't have xyz media player, certain file system support, or other favorite that's in some other Linux.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Rickford Grant, author of Linux for Non-Geeks, and talk with him about his new book Linux Made Easy (No Starch Press).

I was recently looking to upgrade a laptop to Fedora Core 4, which happened to happen at roughly the time I got a copy of Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible by noted technology author Christopher Negus. During a quick scan I ran into a section that I think many Linux users, Fedora or otherwise, might fine useful, Chapter 9, using the 'Internet and the Web,' which despite the chapter heading delves into things many new Linux users might find interesting particularly 'Remote Login Copy and Execution,' which was excerpted in Volume 3, Issue 8 of LinuxWorld Magazine.

Fedora Core (http://fedor a.redhat.com) is one of the world's most popular Linux distributions in part from support by Red Hat and a strong community of users. It also has been a proving ground for Red Hat to develop technologies that will eventually make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Getting the design of your database right has a huge impact on a number of issues. Primarily performance, but it can also affect other areas like the flexibility of your database and how it integrates with the application-level solution, such as PHP or Perl, that you're using.

Unix Advanced Visual QuickPro is a step-by-step guide to configuring the finer points of your Unix machine from file sharing, Web sites, and e-mail through to virus scanning. I talk to the author and long-time friend, Chris Herborth, about the book and the future of Unix and Linux gaming.

The emergence of commodity supercomputing has driven clusters based on the Linux operating system into engineering and scientific research organizations that couldn't afford their own supercomputing resources before. But Linux clusters have the potential to become a hot topic in traditional information technology circles as well. The coming year may well be the technology tipping point when Linux cluster technology escapes its current home in research organizations and inhabits the traditional data center.

In the area of Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs), most people would look at sendmail as the most popular solution in the open source/Linux arena. However, it's not the only solution. Although postfix is popular with a number of administrators (especially those with multiple domains and many users), qmail is the unknown underdog that the experts use.

Dee-Ann LeBlanc's classic Linux for Dummies takes the new user from the basics of the operating system through installing and using it. Now in its sixth edition, I talked to Dee-Ann about the book, her thoughts on the direction of Linux and how she manages to fit all of the work that she does into her busy schedule.

If you have ever met Robin Miller or 'Roblimo' as he prefers to be called, you immediately realize that he's one of the endearing 'characters' that make Linux colorful. Roblimo is editor-in-chief for the Open Source Technology Group, which includes Linux.com, slashdot.org, and SourceForge.net, and is the author of the Online Rules of Successful Companies (FT Prentice Hall).

IT managers who are about to reach for the aspirin as they try to figure out their open source corporate position should grab this book with both hands instead. As the title suggests, it's pragmatic and deals in realism, not ideology.

Michael Stutz, author of The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use, discusses what inspired him to write this book, when he first started using Linux, and other world views.

In keeping with our 'Best of...' theme for this month, I'd like to provide some of the essential titles for learning Linux and open source. These titles were gathered with feedback from our readers as well as other professionals in the field. We've divided the books into subject areas and gathered as much of a consensus as possible.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with the authors of Version Control with Subversion. In this interview, they discuss what Subversion is, migrating to Subversion, and, of course, music.

Marcel Gagné is probably best known for his three-time award-winning monthly column called 'Cooking with Linux,' where he impersonates a French chef serving up fine Linux fare and (naturellement) wine. Here he shares his views on the Linux Desktop.

In this issue, Bernard Golden, author of Succeeding with Open Source, discusses open source software, its pros and cons, and how to choose the right Linux implementation for your business.

The battle between IT professionals and those who use the Internet for destructive purposes is raging - and there's no end in sight. Reports of computer crime and incidents from the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University more than double each year and are expected to rise.

When Rackspace Managed Hosting started in 1998 to lease Internet colocated servers to customers, they went with Linux almost everywhere in an effort to keep costs down. In fact, heavy use of Linux was standard in the low-margin managed hosting sector. According to IT manager Eric Evans, 'people would be surprised by how much they would save if they went with Linux.'

For this issue, I'm going to talk with long-time Linux author Mark Sobell. Mark's first Linux book came out in 1996, when Linux was in its infancy. In this interview Mark discusses Red Hat's Fedora Core 2 version of Linux and his experiences writing Linux books.

The IT Professional's Industry Almanac by Eathen Anderson takes no prisoners. A 10-year veteran of the IT industry, Anderson has written an honest and critical commentary from the trenches. His audience: the fearful and unemployed IT workers. His main preoccupation: the dysfunctional interface between technology and business. Neither is spared, but his analysis leads him to an unexpected conclusion.

This article provides a glimpse into Red Hat: The Complete Reference Enterprise Linux and Fedora Edition (with DVD), published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne. It covers what you need to get started with Red Hat Linux - including the overall design of Linux, Linux distributions, and online resources.

In this installment of the Book Rookery, High Performance MySQL authors Jeremy Zawodny and Derek J. Balling share some of the MySQL lessons they've learned over the years and offer insight into the performance gains possible when you use the techniques covered in the book.

In this installment of the Book Rookery, Martin C. Brown speaks with Dave Taylor, author of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, about all the fun things you can do with shell scripts, whether you're running Linux, Mac OS X, or even a mainstream Unix system.

Marc J. Rochkind wrote the first edition of Advanced UNIX Programming in 1984. In this installment of the Book Rookery, he discusses with Kevin Bedell the second edition - a complete revision that benefits from his years of post-Bell application systems development experience.

Kevin Bedell caught up with Rickford Grant, author of Linux for Non-Geeks, to ask him a few questions about his handy guide for Linux newbies and those with 'command-line phobia.'

In this installment of the Book Rookery, Kevin Bedell speaks with LWM's own Dee-Ann LeBlanc about the latest edition of Linux for Dummies, which features expanded coverage of the Linux desktop, among other things.

In this installmant of the Book Rookery, LWM Editor-in-Chief Kevin Bedell talks with Arnold Robbins about his new book, Linux Programming by Example: The Fundamentals, which will be invaluable to those just learning to develop under Linux.